Posted
by
Soulskill
on Tuesday November 20, 2012 @08:58PM
from the small-details-like-compliance dept.

An anonymous reader writes "A petition has recently been started to get the developer of the popular Android 'MIUI' ROM, Chinese based Xiaomi, to comply with the GPL. While Android itself is licensed under the Apache 2.0 License, and therefore does not actually require derivative works to be FOSS, the Linux kernel itself is GPL-licensed and needs to remain open. Unless Xiaomi intends to develop a replacement for the Linux kernel, they need to make their modifications public."

It depends on how they distribute the sources. If they accompany the binaries with the source code, then you're right. However, if they offer the sources for download or by any method not accompanying the binaries, they have to offer the source to any third party regardless of whether they're a customer or not. That's because the Linux kernel is under the GPL v2 [gnu.org] with no option to use a later version, and section 3b of the GPL v2 specifically says the offer has to be good for any third party. 3a covers distribution only when the source accompanies the binaries, and 3c isn't available because it's only allowed for non-commercial distribution which this isn't.

If you use a different phone with same/similar components, you can reuse the code to write the device drivers.Thats part of the point of the GPL - you don't have to re-invent the same code over and over.

It doesnt matter what they intend. They have shipped modified kernels and they must release those, period.

Of course, they would still have to release source for the kernels they have already distributed.

Exactly what I was saying. The ones they have shipped, the ones they are now shipping, and the ones they will ship in the future. If they 'intend' to do something different later, that changes nothing and matters not at all.

Usually, when a company (or a person) violates the GPL they are asked to either release the source code or remove all GPL code from their product. So for instance if they decided to drop their proprietary implementation tomorrow in favor of something else nobody would follow up on the GPL violation.

Granted, it's not to the letter what is in the GPL, but that's how these things usually pan out.

The key thing to remember is that the GPL is a license to copy a copyrighted work. If a copier fails to comply with the GPL they have no valid license to copy and have therefore committed copyright infringement. They are liable for damages for that infringement and they can be served with an injunction to stop the infringing copying (and in theory I beleive criminal penalties could also apply in some jurisdictions) but afaict they cannot be forced to releas

Xiaomi was launched last year to great applause in China. It was lauded as an original Chinese innovation in smartphones, the company was great, CEO smart, etc. I almost bought one myself, but decided I couldn't live without a physical keyboard (HTC Desire Z). They're coming out with a new phone soon [engadget.com].

It's not that they are being selfish by refusing to share. It simply has never occurred to anyone at the company that there might be rules to follow and a community to participate in. To Chinese, IP is just something that may be freely copied by anyone, slightly modified, and released as your own (when it is no longer OK to copy it, naturally). Ten feet from where I am sitting right now, a man is watching videos of packaging machines in operation and drawing the mechanisms on a CAD program. He is in the R&D department.

Please correct me if I'm wrong, but as long as he's only replicating the operation of the machine and not its internal working, isn't he just reverse-engineering the machine? AFAIK reverse-engineering is legitimate in the eyes of the law.

Strange, patenting software is only legally allowed in what, three countries in the world? China is most certainly not one of them. Why should they care about it any more then a US woman cares about getting stoned for adultery?

So you can copy software concepts in most countries if you want - but if you copy someone else's actual source code, that's illegal by default. They have to make the code available under an open license before you are allowed to copy/distribute it.

DNS-and-BIND specified the mechanisms, which I assume means the internal workings. It might not even be illegal in the US to do that anyways (IANAL, I don't know, but seems like unless it is patented you can copy it), mind you, it just illustrates that some Chinese consider that "research".

Who cares about the legal niceties? To him, and the company, he is engaged in legitimate research and development. While there is always something to be learned from your competitors, in China the balance is way out of whack. At the end of the day, ask him if he spent his time ripping off a foreign company's hard work or developing new, fresh Chinese indigenously produced technology. Go ahead, guess what his answer will be.

You go ahead and sign that online petition to "force" a Chinese company to play fair. Hope you have better success than the hundreds of other companies from whom Chinese businesses have taken what they liked and given nothing back...

For that matter, it probably isn't even illegal in China (do they have a copyright agreement with the US? Seems unlikely), which looks to be the only place they make phones with it pre-loaded, so unless the FOSS people want to block people outside China from downloading it (which I, personally, would find deeply ironic), I don't think they even have any legal grounding whatsoever.

IIRC, it's a fork of Cyanogenmod, and (the non-Android part of) CM is also GPL, so they'd have to also distribute the modifications to CM. This, I think, is the larger infringement that people are annoyed about?

Android mod world (modded roms, cyanogen forks, custom kernels, etc) has tons of examples like this. People who distributes compiled kernels and refuses to share their patches because that way they would "loose" their "exclusive l33t" kernel, since some other modder/coder may "steal" their job (which is basically some minor editing or patch merging on top of a real kernel...samsung kernel for example...plus 10 lines of code to make something happen).

Yes and they're complete idiots for ignoring how much of the original work they got for free because of that same license and how many thousands of people lost their 'leet' exclusivity themselves to get them this far.

Unless Xiaomi intends to develop a replacement for the Linux kernel, they need to make their modifications public.

From the article:

unless Xioami wants to develop a replacement for the Linux side of Android, they need to make their kernel modifications public.

The article is correct. Xioami only needs to make their kernel modifications public. The fact that there happens to be a GPL program in Android (the kernel) doesn't mean all of Android is tainted by it. Showing whatever else they've modified is nice, but not required.

The GPL may be an unconventional usage but it requires copyright. If there was no copyright (i.e., all works were public domain), then companies would be able to take code, modify it, and obfuscate it with impunity. We would see the behavior evidenced in the article, in short. In short, RMS would have encountered that same software issue and been in the same boat that caused him to start the FSF (the key difference would have been that it was legal to disassemble the binary).

Not at all, the purpose of the GPL is to fight copyright until such a time as it no longer exists, exactly as you state above. If this were the case, RMS would have been able to get the source code to his printer driver, and even if obfuscated, would be able to work with it/find someone to work with it.

Yes, but that is still not access to the source code. If decompliing or reverse engineering is the equivalent to having the source code, then why does the GPL require distribution of the source? Instead, the license could just prevent you from disallowing reverse engineering or decompiling. In this case, you could just decompile the whole Linux kernel, and you have the source. Surely that is good enough?

Eliminating copyright would not eliminate the need for the GPL. Source would not magically appear if

"In order for freedoms 1 and 3 (the freedom to make changes and the freedom to publish the changed versions) to be meaningful, you must have access to the source code of the program. Therefore, accessibility of source code is a necessary condition for free software. Obfuscated "source code" is not real source code and does not count as source code."

Eliminating copyright would make the GPL impossible, no matter how people try to spin it.

It may become as a surprise to you but most people are only interested in what they see as "their Social Group", if you feel like your life is/was a struggle then you will mostly be interested in people who struggle. If you are a billionaire you will most likely only be interested in billionaire's problems.

On the other side of the coin are people who don't believe the GPL is even a valid license.

There are a few ultra ritch people, even less of those who don't believe in GPL.(some people don't believe in evolution) It doesn't make them right. GPL is fair license. It's worth defending it, so if many people here say it's good - they define meaning of word good, since they are the majority. And no, copyright breach is not theft, cause we said so.

Yeah, see that is why/. is so confused. Let me explain, so you understand why the stronger copyright is, the stronger the GPL is. The right that the license is granting is the copyright. Without the copyright, you don't need the license and can use it for whatever you want.

Source code is protected partially by copyright. The copyright holder has the right to prevent others from using/copying/distributing/performing/etc their work under copyright law. Thus, without copyright, if your source code leaks, there is nothing you can do to prevent others from abusing it to death, because you have no rights against them to stop it. Copyright is your ownership as an author of the source code. Thus, when you distribute it as open source, you usually grant a license that allows others to use your copyright material without fully surrendering your right. Those holdbacks are the conditions of the license. Again, if there is no copyright law of any strength, then I don't need a license to rip off your source code, I can just do it and there is nothing you can do to stop me.

Conversely, if copyrights are all-powerful, then I can't rip off your source code unless I comply exactly with the granted license that gives me limited rights to your copyright.

I sincerely hope that offers some clarity to you, and the others who don't understand copyrights. You can't argue that on one hand, copyright isn't theft when it is downloading an mp3 and listening to it, but then on the other hand, copyright is theft when you "steal" an open source library without following the GPL. They are the same law and rights.

Copying something that is copyrighted without permission *does* deprive the copyright holder of some of the value behind their copyright.

Copyright literally is a "right to copy"... although it's a legally granted and not a natural right... but the value inherent in it comes from its exclusivity. The copyright holder has an exclusive right to control copies of their work, and everybody else is supposed to obtain permission first. "Exclusive", by definition, means that nobody else is doing it, so when somebody does copy it work without permission, that exclusivity is compromised, and the value of it lessened.

And after all... if the mere right to copy wasn't really of any value to creators, then why would people who bother to make freely distributable works bother to copyright it at all? Why not just put the work into public domain?

The point, therefore, is that copyright *DOES* have value... it's difficult to quantify, but when somebody does infringe on copyright, some measure of that value is actually lost to the copyright holder.

Just because what is lost to the copyright holder is of no value to the person who takes it, doesn't mean that it isn't stolen.

You can't possibly prove the holder loses something. To be able to say that, you would have to prove that if this specific copyright violation haven't take place the holder would earn more, which you can't. It is not just difficult to quantify, it is impossible, and the quantity may very well be zero in the end.

That actually isn't necessarily the case. A GPL violation by another company on code I wrote may put my product at a disadvantage functionality wise. Even though I have given away my code and allow people to use it in other products it is not without benefits to me. Those benefits may be what sell my service/hardware/etc. The value isn't in selling exclusivity as it is in profiting from the benefits of software freedom.

All that is required for infrigment purposes is the ACT of copying or distributing. And since you can not calculate the 'value' of the harm in any meaningful way (because all of the value is based on either unknown future or personal/human value), the consequences of performing that act have been assigned by statute.

I can tell you are not a laywer, but even you should know that "value" doesn't mean "money". For instance, everything that is valuable that is not money, such as the things one trades money for, are themselves valuable.

So too are intangables valuable. For instance, you pay for the right (within limits) to determin who is allowed to access the contents of your house, apartment, and/or other real property. This is the same as how one might buy a mambership to a club so that one receives the right to enter the premises of owned by that club.

So a copyright is "valuable" as it allows the owner of that right to say how many of that thing may be brought into existence and under what circumstances.

When someone brings more of those things into existence than the owner wishes to allow, or does so in a way the owner doesn't wish to allow, they owners valuable right is diminished by misuse.

Much the way I might diminsih the value of any of your properties by misuse (like by ruining your carpet or driving your car into a ravine).

These are not difficult concepts, and many times as you grew to this age, you experienced a diminishment of yoru intangibles. Every time you ever said "That's Not Fair" and no cash was involved, you experienced circumstantial devaluation enough to prompt outcry.

Title 35 is for Patents. Title 17 is for Copyright, and Chapter 5 is for infringement. Assuming, the ludicrous well its free calculation of damages would hold up in any court, which it would not, there is a statutory damages clause for just this reason. I will quote the statutory damages section for you just to shut this ridiculous line of log logic up
17 USC 5 (c) Statutory Damages
(1) Except as provided by clause (2) of this subsection, the copyright owner may elect, at any time before final judgment is r

The life of my children is certainly very valuable to me, but I not so much as valuable to you. Anything can have some arbitrary abstract value to anyone, but in the end, the only real way of objectively measuring it is with money.

OK, so you answered half of my question - your child is valuable to you, which is as it should be. But now for the second half of the question - can your child be replaced with money?

When someone's house is destroyed, what do you most often hear them say? They aren't bemoaning the loss of wood and bricks, or even a place to live. Insurance can fix those things with money. What they are most sad about is the loss of stuff that had great value to them, and which can not be replaced with money. Photograph

That is a good question. What is their value for me? And for you? For the government? For society? Because, you know, the government is not there to make laws to prioritize my notion of value over yours, or over the notion of value of everybody else.

If you measure the value of their values by the money I would be ready to pay to preserve their lives it would probably be all the money I have and everything I could get my hands on by legal or illegal means, including any money the lives of your children co

I don't know why you thought that, since this entire thread contains no reference to enforceability in court. It does, on the other hand, contain discussion on whether all value can be expressed as money or not, and whether or not things that have no monetary value can still be valuable.

In the case of GPL, there is an implicit payment in the form of work. I give you many hours of my work in exchange for the hours of work you put in to improve it.

To me, GPL is an alternative to closed source rather than a true open source license. I use GPL when the quality and continued maintenance of a product is of greater strategic value to me than the monetary value I could get from it when sold. When GPL is violated, the monetary value of that violaton would be the monetary value I could have sold my

Of course, that is true of many crimes. If you take an apple from a store without paying, is it only theft if it can be proved that the apple would otherwise have been sold? No, of course not. If you tap into your neighbors cable, is it only theft of service if the cable company is now unable to supply another customer? No. If you kill someone, does the punishment vary based on proof of how long the person would otherwise have lived? No.

Nope. Copyright violations are violations of a specific law, with penalties for that violation set down in the law. No damages need to be proven, only that a certain prohibited act was committed. Just like with theft. The only thing you have right is that it would be handled in civil court, thus shifting the burden of prosecuting the case to the infringed party instead of the state.

You wouldn't need to get that convoluted. All you need to show is if the copyright violation had happened without a violation of the copyright, that the copyright owner would have gained something of value.

Suppose I went into my garage and a bicycle fairy had packed it full of bicycles. I decide to rent them out at $80 a pop for as long as you wanted to use them and didn't care about the condition they were returned in or if they were ever returned- you could rent a bike for the rest of your life and pass t

I'm just saying if a third party's actions led to a reduction in that value, it's not "stealing".

If there's a reduction in value, then that value is lost to the person who once had it, and in the case of copyright infringement, that reduction is not merely caused by the infringement, but the actual act of infringing itself, since the act of infringing on copyright directly compromises exclusivity, which is the thing which is of value to the copyright holder.

You may as well be suggesting that if I were to somehow siphon some money from a person's bank account and redirect it elsewhere, because I have merely "lowered" their financial worth, I haven't stolen anything.

Of course it's BS... I stole whatever I took. Nothing less and nothing more.

Whether the taker gains an equal value to what the person being taken from lost does not change whether or not it was still taken without permission. A child can steal money from their parents' purse because they like playing with paper. Completely different value systems are involved, yet there's no disputing that it was still stolen.

Of course, things like money in somebody's purse are tangible... and if you're going to argue that intangibl

Not correct, at least not for the version of the GPL in question. Read the GPL v2 [gnu.org] and look at section 3 which covers distribution. Your options:

3a: Distribute the source code along with the binaries. Using this option you only have to provide source to your customers.

3b: Distribute the source code separate from the binaries. This option explicitly requires you to make the offer of source available to any third party, regardless of whether they received binaries from you or not.

3c: Pass on the offer you received. This is only available for non-commercial distribution, so a company selling phones or software wouldn't qualify to use it.

You'd be correct for GPL v3, but the Linux kernel license lacks the "or any later version" language so v3's off the table as far as the kernel as a whole is concerned.

Then point out even a single source file that has that "or any later version" in it from the kernel. Also, the overarching COPYING file for the kernel does not have the phrase in it which would be invalid if any single source file did include it due to the "You may not impose any further
209 restrictions on the recipients' exercise of the rights granted herein" clause.

Individual bits may, but to make use of that you have to separate those bits out from the kernel and distribute them as independent parts. When combined with the kernel, you have to distribute on terms that fit all of the kernel. So if the kernel as a whole is "GPLv2 only" and one driver is "GPLv2 or any later version", you can distribute just the driver under GPLv3 but when you distribute the whole kernel you have to follow GPLv2 because if you used GPLv3 you'd be violating the license to the rest of the k

Does the GPL allow me to distribute copies under a nondisclosure agreement?

No. The GPL says that anyone who receives a copy from you has the right to redistribute copies, modified or not. You are not allowed to distribute the work on any more restrictive basis. If someone asks you to sign an NDA for receiving GPL-covered software copyrighted by the FSF, please inform us immediately by writing to license-violation@fsf.org. If the violation involves GPL-covered code that has some other copyright holder, please inform that copyright holder, just as you would for any other kind of violation of the GPL.

That is complete nonsense. If you (not being the author) violate the GPL (by requiring an NDA for instance), then you have no authorization to distribute AT ALL. Copyright law makes that so, and law trumps contracts.

Of course, if you are the author of the code you can put whatever requirements you want on it, including an NDA. But then you aren't releasing it as GPL code, so there is no point in mentioning it here.

Your statement would imply that if Joe writes a song, and Bobby gives that song to Jane und

I believe only one or two cases have actually made it to court - the vast majority of GPL violators voluntarily release their modified code once somebody complains to them and their legal department takes a look at the license. So yeah, so long as there's a strong legal framework to work in they can be "forced" - the penalties for bald-faced copyright violation are simply too high for a company to bear - especially if they want to continue distributing their product. Think of the outrageous threats made b

Agreed. *IF* the Chinese companies respect the GPL. If they decide to take the codebase proprietary... well probably still good for Linux in that it has a larger deployed codebase to tempt developers and hardware support and undermines the Microsoft hegemony, but beyond that it would be just another proprietary *nix.